Had Marcel provoked this bloody insurrection?  There is strong presumption against him; many of his contemporaries say he had; and the dauphin himself wrote on the 30th of August, 1359, to the Count of Savoy, that one of the most heinous acts of Marcel and his partisans was exciting the folks of the open country in France, of Beauvaisis and Champagne, and other districts, against the nobles of the said kingdom; whence so many evils have proceeded as no man should or could conceive.”  It is quite certain, however, that, the insurrection having once broken out, Marcel hastened to profit by it, and encouraged and even supported it at several points.  Amongst other things he sent from Paris a body of three hundred men to the assistance of the peasants who were besieging the castle of Ermenonville.  It is the due penalty paid by reformers who allow themselves to drift into revolution, that they become before long accomplices in mischief or crime which their original design and their own personal interest made it incumbent on them to prevent or repress.

The reaction against Jaequery was speedy and shockingly bloody.  The nobles, the dauphin, and the King of Navarre, a prince and a noble at the same time that he was a scoundrel, made common cause against the Goodfellows, who were the more disorderly in proportion as they had become more numerous, and believed themselves more invincible.  The ascendency of the masters over the rebels was soon too strong for resistance.  At Meaux, of which the Goodfellows had obtained possession, they were surprised and massacred to the number, it is said, of seven thousand, with the town burning about their ears.  In Beauvaisis, the King of Navarre, after having made a show of treating with their chieftain, William Karle or Callet, got possession of him, and had him beheaded, wearing a trivet of red-hot iron, says one of the chroniclers, by way of crown.  He then moved upon a camp of Goodfellows assembled near Montdidier, slew three thousand of them, and dispersed the remainder.  These figures are probably very much exaggerated, as nearly always happens in such accounts; but the continuer of William of Nangis, so justly severe on the outrages and barbarities of the insurgent peasants, is not less so on those of their conquerors.  “The nobles of France,” he says, “committed at that time such ravages in the district of Meaux that there was no need for the English to come and destroy our country those mortal enemies of the kingdom could not have done what was done by the nobles at home.”

Marcel from that moment perceived that his cause was lost, and no longer dreamed of anything but saving himself and his, at any price; “for he thought,” says Froissart, “that it paid better to slay than to be slain.”  Although he had more than once experienced the disloyalty of the King of Navarre, he entered into fresh negotiation with him, hoping to use him as an intermediary between himself and the dauphin, in order to obtain either an acceptable